Charles Walton’s review of the new film version of Les Misérables echoes my own disappointment with it:
Victor Hugo was no Karl Marx, but he did believe in progress through revolution — a fact that viewres of Tom Hooper’s new film Les Misérables, would never guess. Adapted from the immensely popular musical version of Hugo’s classic (first performed in Paris in 1980), Hooper’s cinematic rendering is stunningly staged and brilliantly performed, but it cuts the author in half: it gives us the religious Hugo, not the revolutionary one. It tells the story of individual redemption through an odyssey of Catholic conscience, not of France’s collective redemption through political violence.
I think this may actually give the film a bit too much credit. Sitting in the theater with a group of students, I couldn’t help think what a missed opportunity the film was as I considered another recent book adaptation: Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit. In a way, the two mirror one another. While the original version of The Hobbit is a plot-driven children’s novel of about two-hundred pages, the film, once complete, will be an epic exposition of an entire mythology over the course of about six hours. The original version of Les Misérables, on the other hand, is a 1,500 page meandering rumination on the relationship between progress and revolution (among other things), while the film is a two and a half hour love story that overshadows, rather than works through, its major social themes. Indeed, while the film puts on display the social miseries of early nineteenth-century France, it only does so in order to maneuver the audience back to the individual characters as exemplary, rather than normative, representations of those problems. Social discontent propels individual characters towards their various ends — for better or worse — but fails to justify, or even represent, the revolutionary impulse as a social phenomenon.
In Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit, we get the themes without the crisp plot, in Les Miserables we get the plot without the themes.